The Rhode Island Department of Transportation formally submitted its application to the Federal Highway Administration seeking the administration’s approval to toll the Sakonnet River Bridge, saying the state needs more revenue for long-term bridge maintenance. The application, more than 2,000 pa...

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation formally submitted its application to the Federal Highway Administration seeking the administration’s approval to toll the Sakonnet River Bridge, saying the state needs more revenue for long-term bridge maintenance.

The application, more than 2,000 pages long, also says the potential economic impact of tolls on Tiverton and Aquidneck Island would be “negligible.”

That application is now available on RIDOT’s website. It includes an environmental impact statement re-evaluation, traffic impact studies, transcripts of the public hearings held last December in Tiverton and Portsmouth, and public comments sent directly to RIDOT and from those gathered by Tiverton STOP.

The state’s fiscal 2013 budget included a provision, commonly referred to as Article 20 by area legislators, that transfers authority of the Sakonnet River Bridge and the Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge to the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority, which currently oversees the Newport Pell Bridge and Mount Hope Bridge.

That article created a four-bridge system that would be funded by tolls collected on the Pell Bridge and the Sakonnet River Bridge.

RIDOT’s report states the cost to install an electronic open highway tolling system on the Portsmouth side of the bridge would be $2.28 million. The cost to maintain all four bridges is projected to be around $38 million annually, with the current toll revenue on the Pell Bridge at $21 million.

Jacobs Engineering and Commonwealth Engineers and Consultants completed the report — which uses the current Pell Bridge toll of $4 each way, and the EZ-Pass rate of $0.83 each way — to project an annual Sakonnet River Bridge toll revenue of $24 million. The annual revenue stream is expected to climb to more than $30 million by 2030.

Starting in fiscal 2014, that revenue stream would provide a surplus of $7 million a year.

The study assumes an average daily traffic of about 40,000 vehicles and assumes that, early on, traffic on the bridge may decline. The revenue stream may decline also as more bridge users purchase EZ-Pass transponders.

Jacobs also notes that the surplus allows “room to reduce the toll rates and still have adequate funds to maintain the bridges ... . Future toll rates, however, will ultimately be established by the RITBA Board through the Authority’s normal process of establishing toll rates.”

It goes on to say “traffic and gross toll revenue estimates will be subject to future economic and social conditions, demographic developments and regional transportation construction activities that cannot be predicted with certainty.”

Later in its report, RIDOT acknowledges the opposition to tolling, saying that those interviewed “emphasized concerns that tolling would negatively impact residents, local businesses, and visitors and the quality of life in affected communities ... .

“Comments consistently cited negative impacts associated with tolls, such as increased costs to operate local businesses, reduced trips to businesses that required crossing the Sakonnet River Bridge, altered travel patterns to avoid tolls, fewer leisure trips to destinations that required crossing the bridge, and difficulty in recruiting and retaining employees for local businesses ... . The overall effect of tolling would be to further isolate communities reliant on the Sakonnet River Bridge.”

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The report also states that “ discounted toll rates for frequent in-state and out-of-state users would help ease the burden of new tolls on the Sakonnet River Bridge. Other mitigation measures suggested by interviewees include ... extracting bridge operations and maintenance funding from other State programs, increased gas taxes, implementing tolling on I-95 and other bridges in the State ... and more accountability and better fiscal responsibility by the State."

Opponents of the toll said the report is “manipulative” and skewed “in favor of the tolls.” Opponents also disagree with the report’s use of the Pell Bridge as a model to assess the impact of another toll on Aquidneck Island.

“We’ve just started to go through the studies,” said Tiverton STOP President Chee Laureanno, who expressed hope that thorough discussions of the toll’s impact would occur in upcoming hearings on it in the state General Assembly. “I don’t agree with Director Lewis’s opinion that the impact of tolls would be negligible.”

“I just don’t see what they are going to do with all the surplus,” said state Rep. John G. Edwards, adding that the studies it reference were not “real economic impact studies.”

Edwards further stated that he and other East Bay legislators “gotta do our job” to change the legislation authorizing the toll.